Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

12

DAYS PASSED IN a flurry of dispatches, expeditions, and consultations. The prime minister took their case to his cabinet, and the decision was made--for now--to indulge Chaison Fanning, just in case it turned out that Leal's story was true. The very first order of business was to verify that, and so a small flotilla of ships made for the sunless countries the very next day, charged with finding Serenity, establishing a safe bridgehead at the door, and entering Brink. Maerta had promised Leal that she would try to rescue Hayden Griffin and the stranded Home Guard airmen from the plains of Aethyr. With luck, they would be able to return the Guardsmen to their people and win some allies there.

In case the rescue didn't happen or the rescued Guardsmen were hostile, Chaison had a Plan B for contacting the Home Guard, and it involved sending Antaea Argyre on a journey to the principalities of Candesce.

That expedition was arranged; meanwhile, Venera's spies went into overtime, tracking the movements of a small set of people who were nominally stateless refugees, but who certainly didn't act like them. The name Inshiri Ferance came up again and again; it began to seem like she had visited every sun in Virga--just, not Slipstream's.

Chaison and Venera Fanning worked together almost without consultation (though that might go on under the covers at night, as some speculated), he organizing the logistics of a new diplomatic network, she calling in favors, sending out invitations, and frankly spying on everybody.

Leal's message to the people of Virga had not yet been announced, but the ripples from its impact were already spreading.

* * *

"THE SIMPLE FACT is, you can't worry people into acting," Admiral Fanning had said at the crowded strategy session. Keir remembered him shrugging. "No matter how much truth you have on your side, and no matter how compelling your arguments, people simply won't move if they don't have to." He had taken a piece of chalk and drawn a white slash through the words "Artificial Nature" written on the chalkboard behind him. Next to it he'd written one of many curious new words Keir was learning lately. This one was "velleity."

"That's our true enemy," he said. "Velleity means 'having a vague desire to do something, but not enough will to actually do it.' If we take our message of urgent action around to the nations of Virga, that's what we're going to get: a vague interest, some desultory waves of the hand, and no commitment.

"So, our first tool will be outrage and excitement."

Keir saw little of that today as he strolled the iron pavement of Rush, Slipstream's capital city. He did see a lot of rushing about in Quartet Two, Wheel One--but that was because the merchants were still making out like bandits from the Freedom Day tourists, many of whom had stayed to enjoy a rare heat wave cooked up by Slipstream's sun controllers. There were plenty of stalls in alley mouths, a few street performers on the odd corner, lots of traffic on foot and in man-powered jitneys, and many smiling faces. The headlines in the newspapers were in small type these days. In more than one sense, a new summer had settled on Slipstream.

"There's the shop," Leal said. "You go on--I'll see you back at the palace."

He grinned at her. "'Back at the palace.' I like that."

They'd just been clothes-shopping, since he couldn't wear his Brink-made apparel without attracting attention, and the boy's clothing he'd borrowed from a mate on the Torn Page of Fate had apparently shrunk. That was today's excuse, anyway; Leal had been dragging him out into the streets every day since they'd arrived. He had to admit it was helping him gain his bearings.

She sent him a luminous smile and turned away. He paused at the beveled-glass door to the bookstore and glanced back, in time to see her raise her face to a beam of hot sunlight from the nearby sun. Of course, Slipstream was as exotic to her as it was to him. He smiled and hauled on the heavy door.

Doors that didn't open for you automatically; gaslight in the evenings; no screens, no scry--it was all bewildering and wonderful, but there was a kind of beauty to life here that he was starting to appreciate. Beauty like these books! He stood by the door, breathing in the scent of the paper for a moment and gazing around in wonder. The walls were lined with leather-bound folios, and most of the floor space was taken up with shelves. The amount of actual information here was infinitesimal--his scry implants could have carried a billion bookstores' worth--but that hardly mattered. Each book was a thing, the care and material going into making it announcing to the world that this knowledge or this story, however small, was a treasure. He flipped through a few of them in delight as the bemused shopkeeper watched.

"Anything I can help you with?"

"Well, maybe." He let his accent shine through. The paper bag containing his clothing would help with this role, but Leal had told him severely, "No pretending. Be what you are: a foreigner." So he didn't hide his hesitation at finding a spot to put down the bag; and he looked around carefully to make sure they were alone before saying, "I hear there's a book I can't buy from you."

The shopkeeper's open expression became veiled. "Don't know what you mean. We have a free press in Slipstream, since the Pilot's death."

"Well, it's not officially banned, but I heard the admiral bought up the whole print run."

"I really don't know--"

"Oh, come on! Do I look like a spy?" --Which was the worst kind of thing to say if you really were a spy, of course, but he was going to obey Leal's instructions to the letter. "You're my last chance; I'm leaving for home tomorrow."

The shopkeeper sighed heavily. "Listen, son, if a book's been banned--officially or not--do you really think you'd be likely to find a copy here?"

"Well, exactly. So..."

The man leaned over the counter. "Where's the last place you'd expect to be buying books?"

"Oh, I don't know. The docks? The butcher's?"

"There's a cheese shop two blocks spinward," said the shopkeeper innocently. "That's pretty much the last place I'd look."

"Huh. Thanks, I'll bear that in mind." Keir left the shop, and five minutes later he walked out of the cheese shop with a brand-new copy of Antaea Argyre's controversial new autobiography. It was, of course, buried in the bag under his new clothing.

The book had been produced in record time. Keir had stopped by while Antaea was still dictating it to the bank of ghostwriters Admiral Fanning had attached to her. Dangling one leg over the velvet arm of the chair she was slumped in, idly swirling a wineglass in her hand, she had been answering yet another question about her mad dash across the airs of the world. The writers were typing madly at their baroque cast-iron "type writers"; torn and crumpled pages forested the floor of the admiralty office where this secret activity was taking place. Keir had shaken his head at her, and she'd rolled her eyes in reply.

Fanning had driven his authors like pack animals, and so the book had hit the printers in a little over a week. Announced in a flurry of press releases and newspaper articles, it was immediately suppressed (though all the copies reputedly destroyed by the admiral were actually winging their way to neighboring countries, to there be sold as rare surviving editions).

All copies were supposed to be going to the public, since Keir and all the others already knew the story. Still, the admiral had started giving him an allowance, and it was up to him how to spend it. This copy of Antaea's book was his.

For a while he strolled the boulevards, enjoying the mad energy of a Virgan city. Without scry and all the other distractions of the outside world, the people here maintained a fantastic focus on their immediate lives. They were passionate in a way that nobody in the Renaissance could ever be. They reminded him of another place ... when he'd ...

He stopped, scowling. He'd almost caught that one. The memories were there, but without the order imposed on them by scry, he had to recover them manually, as it were. This was what de-indexing meant, he'd concluded: erasing, not memories themselves, but one's artificial aids to retrieving them. Maerta had acted like de-indexing was some sort of death sentence, and he supposed that in a way, it was--to someone born outside Virga.

These people, though, had never used artificial augmentations to their natural memories, and they were hardly suffering. In fact, they seemed happier than any people he'd ever met.

Was this his home now? He supposed it could be, and the thought made him shake his head in wonder at himself, for having had no plan beyond leaving Brink. Had that recklessness been courage, or youthful folly? He'd literally had no idea where he would go, but it hadn't mattered. He might not be done wandering yet, but for the moment, he didn't care.

So much for worrying about the future. Leal Maspeth had been shocked and appalled at John Tarvey's offer--but what was his sort of immortality, after all, but a photograph of life, preserved but not living. By contrast, the embodied people of Virga--who lived entirely in their flesh, and died there, too--had the better deal.

The rumble of a trolley sounded behind him. He glanced up to watch it go past, loving its crude mechanical beauty. A machine, designed and built to plan. Wonderful!

The machines of the city charmed him. Maybe he could become an engineer, and design and build the way people had thousands of years ago. To create something like that streetcar from nothing but your imagination and knowledge of the world! That one trolley made the evolved wonders of the Edisonians seem cheap.

Except that one woman didn't seem to see the thing coming. She was waving at a friend and stepping across the tracks as the trolley bore down on her. Keir felt a funny knot in his stomach--was this normal?--and the huge vehicle eclipsed her and he heard screams.

He just stood there, bag dangling from one hand, as people began running from all sides. Where were the medical remotes? The morphonts? First-aid nano? Why should all these strangers be converging on the screeching, braking streetcar whose passengers were toppling and grabbing one another now as the driver swore and swore?

Horror nearly drove him to his knees as he realized that there was no help coming.

Dropping the bag, he ran to the front of the trolley where what had been a woman in a green coat was now half-mashed under its prow. There was blood everywhere. The woman's friend was kneeling next to her and her screams were unlike anything Keir had ever heard.

He found himself reaching out--issuing commands to scry to summon help, to launch first-aid programs--but his hands grasped empty air. There were verbal commands to scry and to the Edisonians and fabs and he choked them out, but everyone ignored him as the driver staggered out of the trolley crying and shouting words in no language. The crying, shouting, and screaming echoed off the buildings and it must be climbing the canyon of the city like a pyre, a smoke of words and regrets rising to vanish in the light of the suns.

The crowd pushed Keir aside and he put one foot in front of the other, and again, feet ticking step by unsteady step up the curb, down the street, but going nowhere now.

* * *

THE LIGHT FROM Rush's sun made a circuit around the room, once every fifty seconds. Leal had timed it. The town wheel turned over, silent and perfect as a clock, and the parallelogram of yellow-white slid slowly down the wall, across the floor, up the farther wall, and back along the ceiling. You could keep time by it--if its cycle lasted a full minute, which it didn't. Somewhere, fluttering deep inside her, was resentment that the wheel's builders couldn't have given it a one-minute rotation. At least then she would have known how long she'd been sitting here with her hands clutched in her lap.

There was a commotion in the admiralty's foyer, then a junior officer stepped into the room. "They've found him," he said.

Leal jumped to his feet. "Is he--"

"He's fine. Doctor says he suffered some sort of shock, but physically, he's fine."

"Ah. I--can I see him? Please?"

The officer stepped out and conferred with someone, then returned. "This way."

Chaison Fanning's admiralty building was huge--so big that its floors curved with the town wheel itself. She shouldn't have been surprised to discover that it contained an entire hospital, apparently for veterans. The officer handed Leal off to a nurse, who led her through a succession of pea-green rooms to a curtained nook where Keir sat. He was staring past the curtain when she got there. Leal looked where he was looking, and saw an old soldier basking in the same sunlight she'd been watching a minute ago. The man was missing a leg and a hand, but otherwise seemed perfectly normal.

The nurse frowned and twitched the curtain closed. Keir blinked and looked up, noticing Leal for the first time.

He said nothing. Heart in her throat, Leal sat down next to him and took his hand.

What to do? She bit her lip, then, impulsively, said, "I've seen that look before."

He cocked his head just slightly. Encouraged, she went on. "My friend Brun went looking for the emissary and found it. He and his men had no idea what they were getting themselves in for. We found him half-dead from exposure, alone in the weightless darkness. He was trapped in a drop of water; the stuff kept condensing onto him, and though he'd push it away it kept coming back. Once he slept, it was going to cover his mouth and nose and suffocate him."

Why was she telling him this? The last thing Keir needed to hear right now was one of the horrors she'd seen. Yet, she heard herself continue. "We got him back, revived him, but something in him ... was broken. He wasn't the same after that. Keir, please tell me that something inside you didn't break today. Whatever it was, it was nothing. Nothing!"

"A woman died," he mumbled. "I saw a woman die."

"Oh." She supposed, coming from where he had, that he'd never had such an experience before. "Oh, Keir, I'm so sorry you had to learn it like that. People die, they die." She sat next to him, pulling his head into the curve of her neck.

"Not where I come from," he said. She tensed, remembering Tarvey, but then he said, "We de-index, and we neotenize. I'd forgotten what those things were, but now I remember. They're an alternative to death. We live immensely long lives, Leal, and when we weary of the world, we ... forget our lives. Start over. We grow down, so we can grow up again and discover everything anew."

Stunned, she froze, and for a long minute neither of them spoke. Then: "Sita," he said, "was my wife."

"Was..." Leal tried to think past her confusion. "Before you came to the Renaissance?"

"I don't know. But I do know that she lost her life. I also know that she didn't die. Not the way that woman today died."

They sat there for another long time, while Leal hunted for something to say that would make sense. "Our world's not evil," she said finally. "Just different. Brun--if you'd seen what he saw in the dark, you'd have laughed it off. To him, meeting the emissary was like ... what you saw today is to you. Not that I would ever laugh off a death, I don't mean that."

He shut his eyes tightly and grimaced. "I was just starting to think that I'd found paradise--like I'd been living in some shadow world my whole life and only just now woke up. And then..."

She nodded against his thick hair. "There's this ancient story that I came across while I was researching the emissary--back when the rumors were that it was a worldwasp, one of the builders of Virga. The story's about a prince who builds a machine to travel outside of Virga. He's been maddened, see, by grief at the death of his wife, and has decided to visit the country of the dead to bring her back. The country of the dead is what lies outside Virga. The story goes that he builds a vast black orb, bigger than a town and sealed with tar and bound in iron. Somehow, he pierces the outer skin of the world and then he sails his mad vessel into the blackness there."

Keir leaned away from her. He still looked haggard, but that awful stare had gone, at least for now. "And then what?" he said.

"Well," she said, crossing her legs and clasping one knee. "That's where the legend ends for most versions of the story; but over the centuries some authors were unsatisfied with this cliffhanger, and here this one added a dramatic return, that one a cryptic message in a bottle, and another, a great voice shouting from the dark..." She smiled at him. "But it's as the story says--the walls of Virga separate the land of the living from the land of the dead. Only now I see, which I never did before, that whichever side you come from is the land of the living, and whichever side you end up in, is..." Suddenly realizing how awful this notion must sound, she stopped; but he was nodding.

"There's a choice to be made," he said. "Immortality or death. Sita is still alive--in some sense. But what happened to her--what I think happened--well, immortality and death are equally terrible."

"There's a third choice, though," she said. He nodded, and then to her surprise, sent her a rueful, and very old-looking smile.

"How neatly symmetrical." His words were dry, even cynical.

He shook away her hands and stood up. "I'm fine," he said. "I'll be fine." Then he looked around his feet. "I lost the bag."

"Don't worry about that. Let's just get out of here." He walked out of the infirmary with her hand on his arm, and, twenty minutes ago, Leal would have imagined no better ending to the episode. Yet his face was a mask and she now knew that it had been from the start--that she had a long way to go before she met the real Keir Chen.

* * *

WHEN VENERA FANNING learned what had happened, she frowned, thought for a minute, then strode into the guest quarters and said, "Where is he?"

She came to stand over him as he sat ashen-faced in a lounge by the window. For a while she sized him up, noting the length of his arms, the muscles in his thighs. He looked back at her mildly; across the room, Leal watched the strange assessment with alarm.

Then Venera turned her attention to Leal. "You. What are you doing?"

"I'm ... writing my memoirs."

Venera narrowed her eyes. "Smacks of procrastination to me." Then she nodded sharply. "Both of you. The naval dockyard, pier fifteen, tomorrow morning. Nine sharp, don't be late."

She stalked to the door, then noticing their astonished expressions, scowled at them both. "Well," she said as if it were obvious, "you might as make yourselves useful."

She turned on her heel and left.

* * *

"THEY DO NOT want me to talk about this. But why not? The truth belongs to all of us."

The sky here was glorious. Fully six suns were cradled by the weightless air, at varying distances that filtered their light from bright blue-white (for the closest one) to bloodred (for the most distant). The spaces around them were shaded every possible hue and, like a faint mist, uncountable cities and towns, farms, lakes and clouds receded through and past them, seemingly to infinity.

It was Candesce that most strongly lit the few pages of notes that Antaea had brought with her. The sun of suns hung directly over her head, and it outshone the lesser lights of the principalities by orders of magnitude.

She cleared her throat, nervously shuffling the pages. About a thousand people had come out to listen to her story; the numbers were growing with every stop she made. People loved to hear the tale of her betrayal, her kidnapping of an admiral and the incursion of a precipice moth into the palace of that infamous pirate nation, Slipstream. She'd spent an hour on it tonight--but it was just the teaser, the bait to bring them here. Her real message would be harder for them to swallow--was not, in fact, meant for these people at all.

In the front rank of the cloud of people, her agent gave her an encouraging thumbs-up. She smiled gamely back, and continued.

"Our societies are only as just as our technologies allow them to be," she said. "In Virga, our governments have to use bureaucracies to manage all the information needed to run a nation. That's important to remember, because when we are oppressed it is not by monarchy, capitalism, absolutism, or whatever 'ism' might cling to the top of a given society's pyramid. Tyranny is shaped by the command-and-control mechanisms that are available--and not by the specific class that tries to use those means. So, in Virga, we are doomed to live lives straitjacketed by bureaucratic governance."

She took a deep breath and proclaimed, "Their individual character doesn't matter! They may be churches, armies, democracies, or 'people's republics'; whatever they are, they all use the same tools, and it is the limitation of those tools that keep our societies in primitive and unjust paralysis.

"The Virga Home Guard knows this. Yet they refuse to act."

Whenever she reached this part of the talk, she half-expected a bullet to strike at her from some unwatched direction. For two weeks now now her talks had been drawing crowds up and down the principalities of Candesce--the most thickly populated volume of Virga. It was part of Chaison Fanning's plan that she be seen, very publicly, to be rebelling against centuries of secretive tradition by revealing the inner workings of the Guard, by speaking of its foibles and its failures. "It will draw them out," he'd said. "You'll see."

Well, it might--but what form would their reaction take? She was risking her life with these words; she hoped he appreciated it.

"The Guard protects us from what lies outside our world," she said, swinging an arm to indicate the indigo depths opposite the bright suns. The citizens of the principalities had an almost unreasoning fear of the darkness that lay outside Candesce's sphere of radiance. The very fact that Antaea was a winter wraith--born and raised in the sunless countries thousands of miles beyond the principalities--helped her draw crowds. Her presence was titillating to the decadents of these inward-turned civilizations, but some of them also heard and responded to her real message. There were rumors now of some secret meeting that was to take place in the pirate nation of Slipstream. Some alarming thing to do with the fabled Guard.

Her next words had not been written by Chaison's ghostwriters. They were her own thoughts, committed to paper in long evening reveries, as she'd thought about Leal's message, and what they'd come to call the Offer. "The Guard protects us, because what lurks outside Virga is another kind of tyranny. There, Artificial Nature makes new kinds of society possible--of course it does, and that's what makes it attractive. But its miraculous technologies also make some ways of life impossible. Some of those ways are the very ones we prize most highly.

"So what are we to do? Accept the tyranny of the system we've got, or bring in a new, different kind of tyranny on the theory that any change will be an improvement? The Guard has always refused to make that choice for us--and this is because they recognize that they do not have the right.

"The Guard's correct not to make the decision for us," she shouted out to anyone who would hear. "For it is our decision to make. It is time for us to take collective responsibility for our situation, and decide: do we accept that we will only ever be able to use those few primitive technologies that Candesce permits us to use? Will we command the Guard to throw open the Gates of Virga and let Artificial Nature into our world, thus changing it irreversibly? Or is there some middle way? Maybe we can send our youth to study in the outside universe, let them return wiser and more knowledgeable than we can be. Maybe we should stop isolating ourselves, and begin asking for news of that wider universe. Allow immigration, emigration, and the transit of ideas even while we use Candesce's power to maintain Virga's technologies as they are.

"Maybe," she said, and now her smile was genuine and confident, "maybe we have other choices."

The talk wound down but now it was all theatrics and calls for action, and when it was done Antaea bowed to the usual applause. The message had been sent, her gauntlet thrown down. Now all she had to do was wait.

She signed books and chatted with people for a while as the crowd slowly dispersed. One of the suns was going out for local night, and in a formerly dark quadrant of the sky, another was coming alight. Antaea yawned as the last autograph-seeker flapped away, and eyed Candesce, which was the sun she set her watch by these days. It blazed as brightly as ever, but she knew it wouldn't be long until it shut down for the evening as well. Then, this unbelievable sky would reveal a sight even more beautiful than the fine colors that reigned now, as millions of windows and running lights lit up across hundreds of miles of clear air. She could go to sleep in the embrace of a measureless galaxy of home and city light. When she closed her eyes, some nights that light remained in her dreams.

"Time to retire, my lady," said Richard Reiss, her agent. She turned and smiled at him.

"What did I say?"

"Nothing." She shrugged. "How was our take tonight?"

"Respectable." He held a thick satchel. "Best get to the drop-off before someone tries to mug us for it."

They shared a smile. There were few people alive who could best Antaea in a fair fight. The money wasn't the bait for their trap, anyway. She'd already laid that out.

Now, as the purple light of Candesce's evening began to wash across the principality skies, she climbed into their twin-engined aircar and took the satchel from Richard's hand. Slipstream's former ambassador to Gehellen was proud to turn his wine-stain birthmark to the light these days; notoriety, he'd discovered, suited him as well as respectability once had. His knowledge of principality fashions and customs was invaluable to Antaea during this junket--as he'd known it would be.

He settled into the cockpit. "Our hotel? Or a good restaurant. I know of one," he said.

"I'm tired," she admitted. "Maybe the hotel tonight." He nodded and turned to his controls, and she reached out to shut the hatch.

"Excuse me." A large figure blocked the outside light. "Are you Antaea Argyre?"

Her hand shot to the little pistol at her belt. "Sorry, show's over," she said quickly as she hauled on the door handle.

A large hand reached up and the door wouldn't move. Antaea pulled out the pistol and aimed it straight at the silhouetted man's chest, her own heart suddenly pounding. "Let go or I'll shoot!"

"Shooting will be quite unnecessary," said another, familiar-sounding voice. A slim silhouette moved into the light, and Antaea's grip on the door eased. "Captain Sayrea Airsigh, of the Home Guard's Last Line," she said. "I believe we met four or five years ago, at the Gates of Virga? --At least, I gather I made an impression on you, since I hear you've been using my name as one of your aliases, lately."

Damn Crase anyway. He'd obviously reported her presence in Sere. She smiled anyway. "Yes, Captain, it was quite a party, and I do remember you. It's good to see you."

"And you," said Airsigh in a sincere tone.

"Apart from catching up on old times, though, I've been instructed to invite you to a small meeting my people have organized. We'd like your opinion on something--or rather, someone."

"Do I have your guarantee that I'll be let go again safely afterwards?"

Airsigh took the question seriously. "You do."

Antaea glanced at Richard, who shrugged. "What do you mean, you want my opinion on someone?"

"The Last Line has a visitor--from outside."

"Outside? You mean--"

"The First Line have sent us an ambassador from beyond Virga, and we don't know what to make of him.

"We'd like you to help us answer a question. Is he--"

"--a monster?" Antaea nodded grimly. "Yes.

"I can do that."